You don’t have to wait until St. Patrick’s Day to make Irish soda bread. Start now and see how quickly those delicious loaves disappear.
Soda bread is a chemically-leavened quick bread, using baking soda instead of yeast. Baking soda produces a lighter, airy crumb. Soda bread dates back to approximately 1840, when bicarbonate of soda was introduced to Ireland. It reacted better with the soft wheat grown in Ireland’s climate, and replaced yeast as the leavening agent.
While the traditional ingredients of soda bread are flour (white or brown), baking soda, salt and buttermilk, soda breads are often sweet breads. Raisins and nuts can be added—and in fact, make soda bread the delight that it is.
Let chocolate and tequila be your cupid. Photo courtesy Sauza Tequila.
If you’re not sharing the evening with someone special, make yourself a special comfort cocktail.
Sauza Tequila suggests this chocolate tequila drink.
CHOCOLATE TEQUILA CUPID RECIPE
Ingredients
3 parts chocolate milk (store bought or homemade)
1 part silver tequila
1 part strawberry purée or daiquiri mix
Garnish: Chocolate-covered strawberry
Optional garnish: chocolate syrup
Optional garnish: chocolate shavings
Preparation
1. Combine chilled chocolate milk, tequila and strawberry purée in a mixing glass. Stir vigorously to combine.
2. Line your favorite glass with chocolate syrup (squirt it on the inside of the glass in an up-and-down pattern).
3. Pour cocktail into the glass.
4. Garnish with a chocolate covered strawberry.
5. Enjoy it: You deserve it!
Rosy and delicious: the Secret Crush Champagne cocktail. Photo courtesy Macao Trading Co.
Here’s a Valentine’s Day version of a Champagne Cocktail.
Called a Secret Crush, it’s a rosy color from the addition of grenadine—a red syrup originally made from pomegranate juice or cherry juice, and sugar. (Grenade is the French word for pomegranate as well as grenade.)
Today, supermarket brands are made of artificial ingredients; but you can find authentic artisan brands:
Stirrings Authentic Grenadine, made with pomegranate juice, is all-natural as well as far more flavorful than the red-colored corn syrup. Monin also makes an all-natural grenadine. Natural brands also include spices, such as cardamom and clove.
You can make this cocktail with Champagne or Prosecco, a sparking wine from Italy that’s lighter and more affordable.
Thanks to New York City’s restaurant hot spot Macao Trading Co. for the recipe.
Preparation
1. Pour half of the amount of the sparkling wine into the Champagne flute.
2. Place the sugar cube on a bar spoon and saturate it with Angostura bitters.
3. Carefully place the bitters-saturated sugar cube into the flute. Let rest for a moment.
4. Add grenadine. Top off with the rest of the sparkling wine.
5. Twist the lemon twist over the drink and discard.
Bitters, by the way, are a strongly-flavored distillation or infusion of aromatic herbs, bark, fruit and/or roots. The term derives from the fact that the recipe contains no sweetener. While artisan brands contain a blend of flavors—angostura bark, cascarilla, cassia, gentian, orange peel and quinine, for example—the best-known commercial brand, Angostura, is made primarily from the roof of gentian, a flower. If you have artisan bitters, substitute them for the Angostura brand specified in the recipe.
The BitterSweets Dysfunctional Collection.
Photo courtesy Despair.com.
Forget those happy Valentine candy hearts—called Sweetheart Conversation Hearts—with their positive messages: Love You, Be Mine and so on.
Despair.com has candy hearts for those who are not in the Valentine spirit.
Choose from three different collections of BitterSweets: Dejected, Dumped and Dysfunctional.
Each box contains 37 brutal kissoffs. The Dumped collection, for example, offers U LEFT SEATUP, BACK 2 KENNEL, I GOT SOBER, CELIB8 THX2U and CALL A 900#.
Six ounces in a heart-shaped tin is $9.95.
SWEETHEARTS HISTORYSweethearts Conversation Hearts, those ubiquitous pastel sugar losenges, have been made by the New England Confectionery Company (NECCO), since the Civil War. The company manufactures more than 8 billion hearts annually.The first versions were made in the shape of a cockle shell. Mottoes printed on thin colored paper were rolled up inside. Sometime in the 1860s, the company devised a machine with a die that printed the words on the lozenge paste. The present design dates to 1902.
Messages included All Mine, Angel, Let’s Kiss, Love, Lover Boy, My Baby and Sweet Talk, among others. Beginning in the early 1990s, the sayings were updated annually. “Call Me” became “Fax Me.” (Hey, what about Text Me?)
The line now includes chocolate, Spanish and sugar-free versions.
